A digital light projector (DLP) includes a Digital Mirror Device (DMD) that receives a demanded image to produce a video or still image that is projected onto a screen. Current DLP projectors use optics including mirrors and lenses to perform projection. Also, current DLP projectors have a color wheel that rotates through the projected light beam. A lamp emits light that can be reflected through a converging lens to the color wheel (usually divided into three pie slice-shaped segments of red, green and blue, or sometimes four segments including a transparent segment), and the color wheel is rotated at an adjustable speed so that the light passing through it is filtered to alternately generate red, green and blue lights. The color wheel is synchronized with a DLP processor chip that controls the components as appropriate to generate a color display.
As recognized herein, for portability and other reasons it is desirable to configure the projector to be as slim as possible, but the presence of a color wheel frustrates this goal. Specifically, owing to geometry the diameter of the color wheel must be two to three times as large as the internal lens, and is thus the limiting constraint in reducing the size of the projector. Simply reducing the size of the lens (and, hence, permitting use of a smaller color wheel) sacrifices brightness and picture quality and can also add more complexity to the optics, so it is not desirable to do so. With these constraints in mind, the present invention is provided.